NTT Communications India Pvt Ltd, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan's NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), is looking to acquire a unified licence for national long-distance services (NLD) in India, the company has said.

It will start a new group company called NTT Communications India Network Services Pvt Ltd in May 2015 through which NTT Com will begin providing domestic network services in the country by the end of this year after obtaining the licence.

NTT Com also announced that it will establish a branch office in Ahmedabad through its Indian subsidiary as part of its expansion plan.

After getting the unified licence, the company will be able to provide a range of network services such as IP-VPN connecting data centers or the cloud to the domestic sales or production bases of customers.

Two years ago the government had raised the FDI limit for NLD services from 74 per cent to 100 per cent.

At present there are six firms which hold NLD authorisation under the unified licence regime including Reliance Jio, Telewings Communications, Sprint Telecom, Sify Technologies, Hughes Communications and Sistema Shyam Teleservices.

In addition, there are 34 NLD licence holders before the unified licence regime was put in place. Besides the national telecom services providers, this list includes global names such as AT&T, Verizon and even non-telecom firms such as Oil India, Power Grid and RailTel.

Currently, NTT Com is providing system-integration services and its another Indian firm Netmagic Solutions Pvt Ltd offers data centre and cloud services with its eight data centres in the country.

Founded in 1999, NTT Com provides consultancy, architecture, security and cloud services. It has operations in 196 countries/regions and has 130 data centres globally.

NTT DoCoMo currently has a JV with Tata Group for providing co-branded telecom services. It has a stake in Tata Teleservices as well as Tata Tele (Maharashtra). However, it is exiting this venture and is expected to sell back the stake to Tatas.